3.11.2014

do nothing

We had a beautiful long weekend. I took a day off from work on Friday, and I made myself a promise not to make a to-do list. Not to plan. Not to toil and worry and stress and feel the guilt of all I hadn't accomplished on Monday, not to fear that nasty word: unproductive.

And you know what? Magically, it worked.

We made no plan. We went for a long, gorgeous hike. We crawled down into a place called Pirate's Cove (if you use the Google Earth view and zoom in, you can see the teeny little spit of beach there). The surf was huge and powerful, and when each wave sucked back out to the ocean it made this deeper than deep, thundering sound of the giant stones tumbling over each other under the water. It was the kind of sound that raises the hair on your arms. It was incredible.

We ate big meals. We tried new cocktail recipes. On Saturday we even scrubbed the entire kitchen, and vacuumed our whole (albeit tiny) apartment - unplanned, unprovoked. To reward ourselves we drank a bottle of champagne in the park and got to see both a puppy and a small child fall accidentally into the pond, in unrelated but equally hilarious incidents. No small creatures were harmed but two drunk creatures were greatly amused.

Now it's Tuesday, and miraculously, plenty of things actually did get done. I say it again: we cleaned the house. (It is an act of restraint for me not to post a picture of our stove right now, it is GLEAMING. I'm very proud.) We did laundry, we changed the bedsheets. I got in a relatively short but very enjoyable run. I've been knitting like a fiend. I even finished my book, which feels great - as I've said before, I hate it when I neglect books.

The one thing I didn't do was any work for HEM. But! I feel no guilt. I have started a phase. This phase is all about enjoying tasks. I have not been enjoying my tasks. Even just the last four or five days of actively attempting to find joy - or at least, not find guilt - in how I spend time has been liberating. Let's see if we can keep it up. Maybe I'll keep being pleasantly surprised by all the things that actually do get done this way.